Fleshing It Out

i've been asked a lot recently (both on the radio and by others) about my newer paintings, what they are about, why so many of them contain kitchen scenes, etc. i'm trying to figure this out myself.

these paintings were all made within the last year once i got a studio set up here in washington. when we left LA, i was working in an abstract manner, using memories of my daily experiences driving around town....that meant i was looking at landscape, the outside world around me: neons, car crashes, wildfires, steep hillsides, tropical gardens, smog. once i got to work here in DC, i took that way of working that i had developed (really paying attention to visual experiences on a day-to-day basis and making an effort to file them away in my memory, then working from memory without outside references) and applying them to my daily life and studio work now. so, that's resulted in a greater attention to interiors and working from my memories of other dwellings i have lived in or had important experiences in. my focus has been on working on our house, and that has come out in my work too. i seem to be gravitating towards kitchens, maybe for the reasons i talked about in the audio clip. they are centers of intense work and creativity, just like a studio. they are rooms we associate with good things: nourishment, love, family, social connections. there are also just really complex places to look at, so many nooks, crannies, nobs, bells, whistles, etc.

the bold black lines and messy paint and patterns are a compositional device. i think they are also a way to convey the way memories are incomplete, incorrect, and very hard to get down on paper like they appear in your head.

so, that's me trying to articulate my thoughts as of now. i'm headed back to LA for the weekend and am interested to see how i will perceive that city this time around. ciao!

Eastside Wins!

A couple of weeks ago, just before I went to DC, I was in Culver City looking at art. There were a couple of interesting shows, such as Andrea Cohen at Walter Maciel and Soo Kim at Sandroni Rey. But everything else....wow. Boring-ass, half finished, sloppy painting carried the day. Even Takashi Murakami at Blum & Poe seemed repetitive and so-what after the MOCA extravaganza this fall. So I finished that afternoon feeling profoundly bored with art and wondering if my own work is similarly blah (not a good feeling with a couple more shows in the pipeline).

But yesterday, gallery-going and looking at paintings were redeemed for me. I went to Kristi Engle Gallery in Highland Park to catch the tail end of Mary Addison Hackett's solo show there. This time....Wow! I could feel from looking at these paintings that Hackett was really going for it; they glowed with her joy in their making. I got up close to study these paintings, and I felt like each one held a hundred little lessons on how to paint: here's how to make crisp linear marks but not make it over-labored; this is how you paint things out and make it look like you meant to; here's how to smoosh one color into another; this is a good way to reference another painter (Phillip Guston, in this case); fluorescent paints open up whole new worlds of color. Rock on!

Tomorrow, June 7, is the last day of this show. Go check it out!

making art

More grappling with divisions in my studio….After a couple of weeks of pinning and sewing and drawing my fabrics together, I seem to be back onto abstract painting on paper this week. Some of the things I have been seeing on my drives around town—big creeping masses of fuschia seeping over a graffitied freeway embankment wall, lovely violet jacaranda flowers floating amidst green leaves, painted-over graffiti in blocks of off-white and gray like a faded patchwork quilt—are sticking in my head and coming out my brush. I don’t know if these images are worth anything or mean anything or not. I am working quickly, like an old-skool action painter, using my whole arm to make the brush smoosh the paint around. But eventually, I step back and think to myself, “Huh, is that all?”

I remind myself of a person whose house I pass almost every day on my way to my studio. He's at the corner of, say, Avenue 20 and Mozart? Somewhere around there. He has a concrete block wall all around his house, painted two different colors. The side of the wall facing Avenue 20 often sports a few graffittied tags in beautiful colors: metallic gold, black, fluorescent pink. But by the next day, the home owner will have come out and painted over the graffitied in white or cream; he's very careful to paint the whole wall so that his place looks nice and neat. He is so careful, and the taggers so persistent. It is a relentless struggle that doesn't really mean much, after all. Just a little bit of paint on a clear surface.